How To Get Stickers In Facebook Messenger For Android Right Now

After it was released in a pool of hype, Facebook Home instantly became the target of heavy criticism from tons of disappointed fans, most of which found the lock and home screen replacement app impractical as a daily driver. There was one feature, though, that was and continues to be lauded by users – the globally accessible Chat Heads. While Facebook Messenger and thus, Home, for Android were the first to receive this feature, it was soon rolled out for the iOS variant of the official Facebook client, but to select users and heavily tied down by the limitations of Apple’s mobile OS. Perhaps to give their iOS userbase something to be happy about, Facebook included chat Stickers in the update, which can be best described as enlarged, glorified emoticons. Although Stickers are yet to make it to Messenger for Android officially, they’ve been discovered hidden away within the current version of the app, and you can get early access to them with a simple trick, discussed past the break.

The method involves a simple tap on the edge of Messenger’s UI. It’ll help if you have slender fingers. You might not get it right the first few times, but know that it does work, as you can see in the screenshots below.

 

Following is what you have to do:

1. Launch Facebook Messenger for Android.
2. Hold down on any message thread and select “pop out chat head” from the menu that appears.
   
3. Once the thread has opened within the chat head, try tapping the very edge of the screen on the left of the add button beside the text input field (the area highlighted in the screenshot below) and the Stickers board should appear below.

You should see tabs at the bottom of the Stickers board. Tap the one shaped like a shopping cart to open Facebook’s new Sticker Store. You can view your existing sticker packs here and download additional ones to your device. As you download more packs, you should see them arrange themselves into separate tabs below the Stickers board.

If the tabs are getting cut off, you probably had the keyboard open and your ROM sports a navbar. Simply close the keyboard and tap the edge beside the add button again to fix this.

This little trick doesn’t enable Stickers properly, though. You’ll need to repeat it every time you want to access them, and depending on your device’s display, that might get slightly frustrating. Still, a good enough alternative till the feature rolls out in an official update.